The Darkening Archipelago

by Stephen Legault

  From where he crouched Cole looked up at the gunwales of the boat, more than a foot and a half in height. It would take a powerful wave to lift Archie Ravenwing’s body from the deck of the Inlet Dancer over those gunwales and into the sea. How would that happen without capsizing the boat, or ridding it of things like fishing tackle or a coffee Thermos?

  Constable Johns stood up and unclipped the radio receiver from his shoulder flash and depressed the microphone button. “Alert Bay, this is pc Johns.”

  “This is Alert Bay, go ahead,” crackled the microphone. Cole and Grace stared up at the RCMP officer.

  “Tell Sergeant Winters that we’ve turned up a foreign substance on the boat. Tell him that we’re going to need a forensics team in from Campbell River. That we’re going to need this boat up and out of the water first thing. We’re going to need to lock it down.”

  15

  “What do you think they’re up to?” asked Archie Ravenwing. He was sitting in Cassandra Petrel’s galley on the Queen Charlotte Challenger. The boat rocked slowly back and forth in the quiet harbour.

  “I don’t know. But as the saying goes, something fishy.” Petrel was pouring tea, the steam from the kettle clouding up the portholes in her galley.

  “Tell me what you know,” Archie said. He was sitting sideways on a bench seat at the table, which doubled as Petrel’s desk. Stacked with reports and papers, the makeshift desk was cluttered with vials of sea lice specimens, and on it a laptop hummed. Archie rested his back on an overstuffed cushion, his feet dangling off the end of the bench.

  Petrel handed Archie a cup of tea, which he held in both hands for warmth. November had grown cold, and it had rained every day for the last week. Not heavily, but steadily, and the wind had blown down the Queen Charlotte Strait, bringing with it cold air direct from the Alaska panhandle. Archie sipped his tea, blowing on it with closed eyes to savour the warmth. Petrel sat across from him.

  “I don’t have any proof yet,” she said, “so don’t go flying off in a rage, Archie. Got it?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, here’s what I think. We know Stoboltz is expanding. That’s certainly no secret. They have, what, twenty-five operations in the Broughton alone?”

  Archie nodded again. “Yeah, twenty-five, twenty-six.”

  “So they have the vast majority of the operations in the Broughton. And more up the coast. And, of course, that’s just their bc operations. They’ve got the market locked up in Scandinavia, off Ireland, and are expanding in the far east. Even into Chile. They’re a going concern. Big bucks. Despite the work that Carrie Bright and sos are doing, the market for farmed salmon is growing. People are more health conscious, they don’t want to eat as much red meat. They want their essential fatty acids. It’s our own damn fault,” said Petrel, putting down her cup and peering through the tiny port window next to the table. “We convinced people that eating fish was good for them. We convinced folks that salmon is a healthy choice. We’re now fighting the by-product of our success.” She smiled at the irony.

  “So salmon sales are booming, and farmed salmon is cheaper, so guess what the American markets are buying? Sure, wild salmon is selling, too, but they’ve been in free fall over the last ten years, thanks in part to the damage logging does to salmon streams. Because the government has allowed clear cutting right up to the edge of many salmon streams up and down the coast,” said Petrel, shaking her head, “those streams can no longer support spawning salmon. No trees mean no shade. No shade means the streams warm up. Salmon are sensitive — they like cool water to spawn in. No trees mean silt and mud in the water. All of this adds up to streams that are no longer suited to spawning salmon. No spawning, no baby salmon.”

  Petrel sipped her tea and looked at Archie. “And now we add a gauntlet of salmon farms, and the juveniles who are born have to run it to make it back out to open ocean. The best waters for the salmon farms, it turns out, are on wild-salmon migration routes. So Stoboltz has done well for themselves. They’ve managed to put a dozen and a half salmon farms into the Broughton in short order. There are what, another ten, eleven, owned by other smaller players?”

  “Yeah,” said Archie. “About that. Not insignificant, I might add. A bunch of those belong to one of Canada’s biggest food distribution companies.”

  “So this much we both know. Stoboltz is riding a wave of early success. They are making money hand over fist, and the minister’s announcement in August was like a licence to print more of the stuff. They are set up for a big windfall.”

  Archie put his cup down and stared straight ahead into the galley.

  “Here’s the part where I’m getting some mixed messages,” said Dr. Petrel. “You know that I send some of my samples to the lab at u vic for processing. This is the detailed stuff, the genetics part of the work. They’ve got state-of-the-art equipment for analyzing my — our — sea lice samples.” She smiled. “Comes back in a couple of weeks. Full report. Stacks of paper,” she said, patting the piles on her table. “I’m going to need a bigger boat if this keeps up. So a few weeks ago I got a call from the lab saying that they’d had a mix up, and that they had accidentally sent me back the wrong data. I thought it was kind of strange, because as far as I knew I was the only one sending in sea lice samples. The provincial and federal government have washed their hands of it. The minister’s so-called commitment to a sea lice study got bumped to next year’s budget. So it’s just you and me, partner. They asked if I would send the data back, and they would send me the correct stuff. At first I thought that maybe it was salmon data, or black cod, but no, I looked, and it was sea lice data. The strange thing is, the samples were taken from the same area as ours. Mostly in Tribune Channel. So I did something that maybe I shouldn’t have, but curiosity got the better of me. I read the reports.”

  Archie turned and looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “And?”

  “Well, it was strange. I don’t really understand it. The data on the lice shows levels of veracity that is troubling. First off, there were more lice per fry than I have ever seen. Literally hundreds. They were smaller than what you and I have been finding. That should be good news, but it wasn’t, because they were tenacious. The data showed that the lice in question were killing salmon fry at a much higher rate. Almost double what you and I have been finding.”

  Archie turned on the bench to face Petrel.

  “I was pretty curious about this research. Thought that somehow it must be wrong. So I called the lab. I know most of the people there pretty well, so I got someone on the phone and asked them some questions, you know, in confidence. Was this data right? They said it was. So I asked them where it was coming from. It took a little doing but I found out who was submitting the lice for analysis. It was Stoboltz.”

  Archie shook his head. “Really?”

  “Really. Now, don’t go jumping to conclusions, Archie. I mean, we’ve been demanding that they do their own studies for some time. So now they are. But what they are finding is particularly troubling.”

  Archie rubbed his temples, his eyes pressed shut.

  Petrel said, “If Stoboltz is finding sea lice that are that tenacious at taking down migrating salmon fry, then we’re going to have to find out exactly where they are taking their samples. We’re going to have to demand that the information be made available to decision makers.”

  “Or skip the middleman and go straight to the media,” said Archie, looking up again.

  “Eventually, but remember, we’re not supposed to have this information, Archie.”

  “Who cares!” he said, his voice rising an octave. “Who cares,” he said more calmly, drawing a deep breath. “This only confirms our worst fears. It could well be that the sea lice that are breeding in the Atlantic-salmon pens up Tribune Channel — likely at that new operation at Jeopardy Rock, where the old dfo station is — are even worse than what we’ve seen before. Do you know what this could mean come spring? When half a million pink-salmon smolts swim down Knight Inle
t? It could be disaster. It could wipe them out!”

  Petrel stood and poured them both more tea. “We don’t know what this means, Archie. We’re going to need more information. We’re going to need to verify this ourselves,” she said.

  “Damn right we’re going to.”

  “Okay, so how?”

  “We’re going to start taking samples further up the inlet, up around Jeopardy Rock.”

  “Archie, you know this better than most, I think. Maybe you know this better than I do. Salmon hold this ecosystem together. They hold it together and they give it life. They are the energy that everything else feeds off.” She stood up, urgency making her restless. “We’re going to lose this animal if we don’t do something, and do it soon.”

  Archie said nothing. He turned his eyes to her. “I don’t know what to do anymore. I just don’t know what else to do. We’ve spent the last two years piling reports and papers and evidence on the desk of the minister, and he just doesn’t seem to get it. It’s not that the information isn’t compelling. The scientific evidence is plain as the nose on my face! But he doesn’t care. The government doesn’t seem to care. The evidence is clear; it’s the will on their part to do something, anything, with it that is missing.

  “You know,” she started again after a brief pause, “that when fishermen bring me these farmed Atlantic salmon, the ones that have escaped from Stoboltz’s pens, they practically fall apart in my hands? I can scrape the meat off with my hands and make a snowball out of it, Archie. It’s awful. There is no muscle in these fish at all. And cut them open! There is a band of fat that twines around their organs that is completely unnatural. Their guts are just a mess, and where they have been vaccinated against the disease that is rampant in those pens, their guts have actually adhered together, actually bound up into a knot. You can see where the needle has been stuck in them.”

  “I’ve seen it, too,” said Archie. “We call them ‘death with fins.’”

  Cassandra nodded. “You know, if I wanted to devise a plan for killing wild salmon, I’d do exactly what Stoboltz and the government are doing. I’d build a series of open-net pens along the most productive migration routes for wild salmon, and I’d stock those farms with disease-riddled fish that are full of sea lice, and then I’d sit back and do nothing. I’d just wait. Because the fry and smolts that are born in the headwater tributaries are going to swim right past those pens. They run the gauntlet when they do. And what we’re seeing now is that most of them aren’t going to make it. And now, to make it worse, it looks like the sea lice are growing more tenacious. We need to figure out what the hell is going on at Jeopardy Rock.”

  She sat down, the wind blown out of her sails. “Archie,” she said, her face in her hands, “if we lose the salmon, we’re going to lose the whole thing. Killer whales. Grizzly bears. The web of life on the land and in the sea is dependent on these animals. We lose the salmon, it’s like pulling the plug. It’s like pulling the electrical cord that powers this whole ecosystem. The whole place will go dark. This whole archipelago will go dark.”

  — Archie Ravenwing sat at his own cluttered desk, his feet propped on a clear corner, his cordless phone in his hands. He looked around the room. Filing cabinets, a club chair, a table piled high with band business. Aquaculture, logging, and grizzly bear hunting files. On the wall was a series of marine charts showing the Broughton Archipelago and Knight Inlet at 1:50,000 scale. Red Xs marked the locations of salmon farms, Blue Xs the locations where he or Cassandra Petrel had taken samples. He would extend those blue Xs further into Tribune Channel and up Knight Inlet itself this winter, towing plankton nets in search of sea lice larvae. He would do everything in his power to stop to proliferation of the red Xs.

  He looked out the window at his unfinished deck. He shook his head. A big mistake. One that would cost him, no two ways about it. Greg White Eagle had him over a barrel with that. On the other hand, Ravenwing had information that could put Greg behind bars. Or at least ruin his political career. If a man like Greg White Eagle was allowed to get away with this, it would ruin the good name of the North Salish First Nation. And it would ruin his people’s way of life.

  How far up the chain of command did the collusion extend? Archie knew that Lance Grey was in on it, though to what extent remained a mystery. Did Lance and Stoboltz help Greg steal the election from Archie? He wouldn’t put it past them. The political machine in Victoria was hungry for an expansion of salmon farming along the bc coast. Archie believed it was possible that Lance provided the necessary political cover for Stoboltz to finance Greg’s election bid. It was possible that the minister’s office, through Lance, had actually bankrolled it, but so far Archie had no evidence of that. At this point, Archie didn’t know what the complicity between Lance Grey and Stoboltz looked like, but he had his suspicions — a gas rebate incentive, where money was doled out to willing voters to get them to the polling station? Maybe vouchers for materials and supplies? Maybe bribes for votes, plain and simple? Archie would have to dig further to get to the bottom of that debacle. But could he use what he found, given what Greg White Eagle had on Archie himself? He shook his head and cursed himself. “You really fucked up this time, Ravenwing. Pretty dumb, chum,” he said.

  He looked at the phone. “To hell with it,” he said, and dialled a familiar number.

  “Minister of Agriculture’s office,” came the answer.

  “Lance Grey, please.”

  “Can I tell him who’s calling?”

  “It’s Archie Ravenwing.”

  “Hold a minute, please.”

  “Lance Grey.”

  “Hi Lance, it’s Archie.”

  “What can I do for you, Archie?”

  “I’ve got some questions about sea lice.”

  “Thought you had the expert right there in little Port Lost-coast.” “Not that sort of question.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “What I’m wondering is if Stoboltz Aquaculture has a permit to sample for sea lice in the Broughton Archipelago?”

  “That’s a funny question coming from you. Haven’t you been demanding that they do that for the last four years?”

  “Does that mean they have a permit?”

  “They do. I recall it coming across the minister’s desk from dfo late last year.”

  “Do you know if the results of their studies are going to be made public?”

  “I expect that they will. At least some of them. Anything that doesn’t directly relate to business decisions will be, anyway.”

  “Do you know when?”

  “Well, if memory serves me, they are doing a three-year study.”

  Archie blew out through pursed lips. “Bit of a wait, hey?”

  “Good science takes time. You know that.”

  “Fiddling while Rome burns takes time, too.”

  “Come on, Archie, enough of the doomsday talk. The minister has made a good decision, one that balances the concerns for wild-salmon populations with the need for new salmon aquaculture in the region. This minister has bent over backwards to accommodate your concerns, and those of the environmentalists and people like Cassandra Petrel — ”

  Archie cut him off. “Let’s not be naive, Lance. The minister is doing the minimum necessary to avoid ending up in court on federal fisheries charges while capitulating with Stoboltz and the other salmon farmers in the slow, silent demise of wild salmon.”

  “Archie, I have to be going now.”

  “One more question.”

  Grey was silent on the other end of the phone. Archie heard typing.

  “I wonder what Stoboltz intends to do with all of that data, really?”

  “You’d have to ask them. I don’t know any of the details of their work, Archie.” The sound of typing continued. Was Lance Grey checking his email while talking with him? Archie wondered.

  “Do you think it’s possible that Stoboltz is going to use the data they get to justify their expansion into other areas of the Broughton?
”

  “Again, you’re asking the wrong guy, Archie. I don’t know what they plan on doing with the data.”

  “But they would have had to specify the purpose of the research on the application for the permit to collect.”

  “Look, I know that the minister signed it, but it was one of dozens that came across his desk from the department. I didn’t even look at them.”

  “Do I need to go through Access to Information?”

  “You seem to know how.”

  “You never know what I might find, Lance.”

  “Are we through here, Archie?”

  “One more question.”

  “You said that four questions ago.”

  “These are multi-part questions, Lance.” Archie laughed. “Is it possible that Stoboltz is looking at sea lice so they can figure out a way to breed resistance in their Atlantic stocks?”

  “Wow, Archie,” said Grey, the typing silenced. “Where did you come up with that theory?”

  “Well, they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. And they aren’t doing it to figure out how to restrict the expansion of their operations. They are almost certainly going to use their data to expand, but from what I’ve seen, the data they’ve come up with is even worse that what Cassandra and I are finding.”

  “You’ve seen the data?”